Election '10

Friday, August 05, 2011

In the end, every civilization dies of stupid, and America will be no exception. I’ve long suspected this, of course, but the point was driven home to me this morning by an email forward I received containing the comments of several wingnut relatives / friends.

First, a little back-story: These are middle-class people who, although they live better than 99% of the inhabitants of the planet are, like me, hurting in this endless economic shitpile and truly worried that things could go all Mad Max if it gets any worse.

These are not stupid people (despite the title of this post and allusion to death-by-stupid above). They can walk in a rainstorm without drowning. They hold responsible jobs. They’re conventionally educated to varying degrees. They’re warm, funny and generous to boot.

But the shit they believe makes me want to want to reverse-engineer the motor on my shop vac to create a high-capacity bourbon-bong for my exclusive use. The email in question concerns President Obama’s presser during the debt ceiling debacle and the response on the Senate floor by Florida’s wingnut pin-up squish Marco Rubio.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Nothing raises my hackles like a political conversation that starts with “both sides do…” because 999 times out of a thousand, what follows is pure, unadulterated bullshit. But here’s that one in a thousand case of true equivalency: Both sides do contain way more than their fair share of puling infants.

First there’s the right-wing freak-out over the identification of self-proclaimed Christian Anders Behring Breivik as a “Christian” and a fan of anti-Islam hate sites like Atlas Shrugs. Sorry, but that’s what he calls himself. And if you’ve spent the last decade shrieking “GLOBAL JIHAD” every time a Muslim jaywalks, you don’t get to yell “BLOOD LIBEL” when one of your fans takes your eliminationist rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Monday, August 01, 2011

Despite having the country’s fourth-highest unemployment rate, its second-highest rate of people without insurance and a $3.7 billion budget gap this year, [Florida] has turned away scores of millions of dollars in grants made available under the Affordable Care Act. And it is not pursuing grants worth many millions more.

In recent months, either Gov. Rick Scott’s administration or the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature has rejected grants aimed at moving long-term care patients into their homes, curbing child abuse through in-home counseling and strengthening state regulation of health premiums. They have shunned money to help sign up eligible recipients for Medicare, educate teenagers on preventing pregnancy and plan for the health insurance exchanges that the law requires by 2014.

[snip]

In distancing itself from the (Affordable Care Act] law, Florida declined to participate in a Medicaid pilot program that would have authorized up to $2 million in reimbursement to providers using a new hospice model for severely ill children. The state insurance commissioner applied to the Obama administration for a waiver from this year’s requirement that health insurers spend at least 80 percent of premium revenue on medical care.

Okay, so (P)Rick Scott refuses money to keep grandma at home, help abused kids, prevent teenage pregnancy, assist terminally ill children and force insurers to spend 80% of premiums on medical care. Is there anything he does want to spend money on? Sure—a celebration for fetus fetishists:

Gov. Rick Scott held a celebration at the governor’s mansion this weekend in honor of the four anti-abortion bills he signed into law.

Partygoers celebrated the new laws requiring ultrasounds, redirecting license-plate funds to anti-abortion groups, blocking state or federal health insurance funds from going toward abortions, and sending letters to parents whose children received abortions.

You know, as a general rule, I try not to wish for harm to come to others—even horrible people. I make an exception for Scott, who should go jump in the nearest forest fire.

(Obviously a clean vote on the ceiling would have been far preferable to the insanity we’ve been put through the last couple of weeks but Obama seems to have played a decent waiting game and pulled out, if not exactly a plum, at least not a shit sausage.)

Friday, July 29, 2011

Yes, the end has come. Speaker Boehner’s solution to being unable to pass a plan in his Republican dominated House that is already DOA in the Senate and would be vetoed by the President if it DID make it through, is to come up with one that’s even less likely to get through and furthermore would probably still result in a massive credit downgrade. This is because it still requires a second vote on the debt ceiling before the elections and this time it would require that both houses pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution (and I’m thinking that requires like a 2/3 majority vote) and send it off to the states who will, of course, joyfully pass such a thing as quickly as possible. In the next, um, 10 months or so.

So we’re doomed.

And now, boys and girls, we will begin to discuss the basics of a survival garden. Don’t have a yard, you say, or, even worse, worried about unemployed scavengers robbing your tomatoes and cukes? Grow an indoor garden!

Thursday, July 28, 2011

John McCain, who is a “maverick” on the planet where “maverick” is synonymous with “weather vane,” sensed a shift in the wind and took to the Senate floor to denounce the “tea-party Hobbits” who are threatening to toss our economy into the fires of Mount Doom:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.

Of course, McCain neglected to mention that he attempted to foist Angle the Crackpot Hobbit off on America by campaigning for her. Nor did he allude to the fact that he elevated the Queen of the Teatards to the national stage by choosing Quitting Bull as his running mate in 2008.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

By happy coincidence, if Speaker Boehner has standard-issue wedding tackle comprising one twig and two berries, Norquist, Limbaugh and Erickson have three objects to divide between them. While there can be no doubt that these three men each hold a piece of Boehner’s junk, some mistakenly assume that their motivations are identical.

This assumption does the men a disservice: They are actually quite a diverse troika, despite all being somewhat sweaty, corpulent white males who share a conservative worldview, a yen for media attention and a fondness for gopher buggery. [Typo—ed.]

How do they differ? Well, Norquist wants to destroy the US government altogether, hence his famous “drown it in a bathtub” quote. He’s a businessman, though, or at least a tool of businessmen, so he isn’t actively pushing for a default.

Limbaugh, on the other hand, famously wants Obama to fail, and if it takes linking the default deadline with Ramadan to make his drooling army of Dittoheads recoil in horror at a deal that averts default, that’s fine with him. Their credit card interest rates will skyrocket after a default, of course. But Limbaugh is a multimillionaire who ives in a gated community and has a pantry filled to bursting with the Three Cs (Cheetos, cigars and caviar), so he’ll be fine.

And finally there’s Erickson, who is just too dumb to grasp the implications of default and thus reflexively opposes a man Erickson’s hero, the late Senator Jesse Helms, would have privately called “that no-‘count nigra.” Erickson doesn’t see the piano winched via fraying rope over his own head. He’s too busy preening about his vast influence with the teatard loons in the House to look up.

So there you have it, folks: Half of our political system is controlled by three narcissistic sociopaths who are by turns destructive, vindictive and stupid. Boehner dares not make a move without their say-so. Therefore, we are doomed. The end.

On the deficit crisis, Ezra Klein says the Republicans have already won:

If you take the Republicans’ goals as avoiding a deal in which they have to vote for tax increases and denying Obama a political victory, it looks like they have succeeded. That success has come with costs—they’ve done themselves political damage, are risking a crisis that could do the economy tremendous harm, and have left the Bush tax cuts unresolved, which means they might end up watching taxes rise much higher than if they’d taken Obama’s offer—but it’s still been a success.

The question is, what happens if they don’t stop pushing?

Did he say “if”? Hahahaha! Still, I’m not so sure I’d characterize the above outcome, if it holds, as “winning,” except perhaps in the Charlie Sheen sense. We’ll see what happens, but the Republicans appear likely to come out of it with some “damn’d spots” that are going to be awfully difficult to scrub away.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

As John Cole noted nearly two years ago, there’s no such thing as Peak Wingnut—it is an endlessly “renewable resource.” Subsequent events have underlined the truth of that assertion more strongly than perhaps even the most pessimistic of us imagined.

But is there a limit to the credulity of low-information voters and the media organizations that keep them in that state? We may be about to find out.

The limits of the Big Lie won’t be tested on an issue like climate change. The anti-science propaganda on that topic has been so successful that it’s probably impossible to address it in a meaningful way—even if the water starts lapping at our doorsteps in low-lying states.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh admonished fellow wingnut Matt Drudge for falling prey to government-orchestrated hysteria over climate change, a phenomenon just about every reputable scientist on the planet regards as a fact. Drudge has served as a primary purveyor of climate change doubt, trumpeting every winter snowstorm as if each snowflake were a repudiation of Al Gore and relying (successfully) on public ignorance to draw conclusions favorable to Koch Industries. A little heat wave heresy won’t change that.

Monday, July 18, 2011

The panicky GOP establishment walk-back on the debt ceiling would be comical if the implications of failure weren’t so dire. Mr. Boehner was frightened enough by the impenetrable ignorance of his Tea Party faction to compel Paul Ryan to explain reality to them:

At a closed-door meeting Friday morning, GOP leaders turned to their most trusted budget expert, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to explain to rank-and-file members what many others have come to understand: A fiscal meltdown could occur if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling.

Ryan no doubt used the types of charts, graphs and video inserts that once so impressed Fox & Friends’Gretchen Carlson. To avert lip-movement fatigue among members who were having trouble following the scant verbiage on the charts and graphs, Ryan may have employed hand-puppets in at least one segment:

Elections have consequences. One of the consequences of the Great 2010 Temper Tantrum was that the fate of the entire planet’s economy was placed under the influence of several dozen gibbering loons possessing the unique “chootspa” of Michele Bachmann.

These are folks actually dumb enough to believe the Randroid claptrap pumped out by the GOP rebranding initiative (and wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc.) known as the Tea Party. Let’s just hope that next time the GOP goes shopping for “useful idiots,” they’ll give due consideration to that crucial adjective as they inspect the wares.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

We’ll have to see how this debt-ceiling drama shakes out, but the reactions to the hostage-takers’ proposal to stop pointing the gun at the economy and hand the weapon over to the president instead are about what you’d expect.

The GOP money people, who are surely venal and corrupt but aren’t irretrievably stupid, understand that debt default would be bad for business. Therefore, they see Mitch McConnell’s proposed buck-passing as reasonable:

The pure, unadulterated stupid in the GOP resides with the Tea Party buffoons (aka, the Bush dead-enders, aka, the base), who don’t understand anything but white hot anger and are ready to train their hate-beams on McConnell for selling out:

So what title did Erickson decide was more incendiary than depicting McConnell as the betrayer of Jeebus? A title that both depicted McConnell as the betrayer of Jeebus AND suggested that McConnell be symbolically purified by fire:

Hahahaha! Erickson should have signed with AMC rather than CNN; he’s the biggest drama queen on the internet.

Friday, July 08, 2011

Jeebus, the pre-debt ceiling deal freak-out is in full swing. My email box is crammed with urgent messages from lefty organizations like Bold Progressives.

Though the punctuation is marginally better and the writers are less reliant on the CAPS key, the breathless outrage and sketchy sourcing remind me of the wingnut chain emails my old granny forwards about Sharia law and SOCIALISM!11!! and how Obama turns his back on the flag during the pledge of allegiance.

I’ll be pissed if any debt deal results in widening the already unacceptable chasm between the haves and have-nots. But I recognize that Obama, Pelosi, et al, are dealing with the most florid pack of sociopaths to infest Congress since before the Civil War. Therefore, I think I’ll continue to give the benefit of the doubt to the sane. Which seems to include fewer on “our” side every damn day.

“You’re doing a lot of things people had hoped you would do, and yet (your) approval rating recently has not been steller [sic],” Huckabee said. “And I’m stunned as to why.”

And Scott is doing a lot of things Florida residents such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter hoped he would do, like attempting to auction off disabled orphans’ crutches and wheelchairs to zero out one of the nation’s lowest corporate tax rates and completing the pauperization of the state’s already impoverished public school system.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

He’s only been in office for about six months, but Governor (P)Rick Scott of Florida has hit rock bottom, besting near-universally loathed assholes like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich and Illinois’ Pat Quinn to grab the nation’s most unpopular governor title. How pathetic is Scott? He’s down to 29% approval, which is well within the Crazification Factor margin of error.

Like I said, he’s only been governor for six months! The Scott Administration may offer an important test for the Crazification Factor, which holds that approximately 27% to 29% of Americans (and perhaps people worldwide, I dunno) are either batshit crazy or so irrational and indifferent to their own interests that they might as well be. Think Bush dead-enders, hardcore Palinites, Alan Keyes voters. That crazy.

Since we’ve got three and a half years left under Scott and he’s probably not going to suddenly stop acting like an imperious, greedy, compassion-free asshole, we’ll get to see how the Crazification Factor theory holds up. If Scott’s approval ratings sink even lower, it could have far-reaching implications for brain-injury regeneration and psychosis recovery research.